In the customer relationship management (CRM) environment, agents tend to multitask. But the current CRM systems are not task-centered and therefore hinder the agent's multitasking performance. We proposed the task-centered context manager, which better matches the agent's mental model by focusing on the tasks that an agent is working on. The task-centered context manager automatically creates contexts, each for a separate task. It provides a flexible context switching mechanism for agents to easily go back and forth between tasks. And its priority-driven interface helps agents focus on important tasks. A formative usability evaluation indicated that our task-centered context manager was very well received by participating agents as evidenced by the overall System Usability Scale score of 88.5.

Web chat is becoming the primary customer contact channel in customer relationship management (CRM), and Question/Answer/Lookup (QAL) is the dominant communication pattern in CRM agent-to-customer chat. Text-based web chat for QAL has two main usability problems. Chat transcripts between agents and customers are not tightly integrated into agent-side applications, requiring customer service agents to re-enter customer typed data. Also, sensitive information posted in chat sessions in plain text raises security concerns. The addition of web form widgets to web chat not only solves both of these problems but also adds new usability benefits to QAL. Forms can be defined beforehand or, more flexibly, dynamically composed. Two preliminary user studies were conducted. An agent-side study showed that adding inline forms to web chat decreased overall QAL completion time by 47 percent and increased QAL accuracy by removing all potential human errors. A customer-side study showed that web chat with inline forms is intuitive to customers.